Facebook Announces 'Graph Search' To Take On Google

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken to the stage at their California headquarters and announced 'Graph Search.' Forming an indirect, social-based competition to Google, it is "a completely new way for people to find information on Facebook."

This is not a web search product similar to Google. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: “hip hop”) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: "my friends in New York who like Jay-Z") to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that's been shared on Facebook.

Filtering these searches will be something alike a more advanced tagging system, which goes through personal items (connection, relationship, interests and location) to build a socially relevent set of search results based upon parameters. Ordinary searches will be dealt by Bing through the same search bar at the top, making for a strong presence from Facebook in taking on the Search giant.

Through this new search integration, Facebook is relying on the vast wealth of social connections to deliver results right for each individual user, firstly presenting results that the specific user and friends interact with the most, followed by mutal friends and engagement. The first version will focus on four particular areas: People (“friends who live in my city”), Photos (“photos of my friends before 1999”), Places ("countries my friends have visited"), and Interests ("movies liked by people who are film directors").

In respects to privacy, Facebook say this is kept as a priority in the search: "It makes finding new things much easier, but you can only see what you could already view elsewhere on Facebook." Whatever settings you have for what content is shared with which group of people, be it just you or to friends, it will afffect search results and take you out of any public searches for a query.

Looking forward to this new search? Think it'll bare any competition to Google? Only time will tell.

Facebook Announces A New Look For News Feed

Facebook has unveiled a new look of the News Feed, radically redesigned to give the site a much-needed overhaul. Clutter has been reduced, bigger images are now incorporated and greater customisation is possible, which the company hopes will keep user attention and attract advertisers.

Facebook Home Announced. Revamps Any Android Phone To Be About 'People, Not Apps'

After years of speculation, Mark Zuckerberg talked about that Facebook Phone. Introducing 'Home,' a deep software integration with Android, that takes over the homescreen and designs your phone around "people, not apps." HTC's Peter Chou also took to the stage at the social network's campus in California to announce the HTC First, a hardware realisation of Facebook's vision.

Editorial: Don't call it a Social Graph

“As Facebook adds more and more people with more and more connections it continues growing and becomes more useful at a faster rate. We are going to use it spread information through the social graph.” Mark Zuckerberg claimed a while ago in 2007, while explaining the secret behind the social network.

Now there's always been something that's sounded a little off to me whenever I've heard the term 'Social Graph.' At first I thought it just sounded pretentious; but the search brought forward the utmost primary reason why.

Editorial: Google+ is not a social media game changer

Google+ has an obvious advantage in search results, presents unique opportunities for brands and is backed by deep pockets, he argues. And all of these factors make it a social media platform that will stick around in a big way.

In respects, his argument for the social network succeeding make sense. Comparing it to Facebook at such an early stage in development is the equivalent of comparing the aforementioned to Myspace back in 2006: it's still rather early days, and has a lot of changes to undergo. But in it's current state, Brogan pointed out the crucial flaw with Google+ through via one of his points deemed as a positive.

'Focus on the User' retools Google Social Search to work with all networks

Engineers from Facebook, Twitter and Myspace have banded together to "Focus on the user:" a project that reworks Google's social search update to include all social networks instead of it's own.

So as Google released Search Plus Your World to coincide with their social networking service, people realised that this wasn't exactly 'social' and it wasn't really 'your world.' As we made rather clear, for this to be seen as a social search it needs to be open, and that's exactly what this developed bookmarlet does.